The Judiciary

Drawing is a wonderful craft. More and more people draw nowadays. It is a testament of this craft’s importance that you will find the skill required in various computer and phone applications. The scientist and educator Dr. Elizabeth Edwards who wrote the book “Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain” said as much. She believes that drawing derives from a person’s right brain hemisphere. This part of the brain does not think by “linear logic.” It thinks instead in terms of spaces and how they interact. It is sensitive to visual elements like line and values, spaces of light and shade, which produce the illusion of volume on a flat paper. The right side of the brain thinks holistically. It takes in the image as a whole and makes judgments from this.

It would seem as if this type of judgment has no application in the judicial process such as we see transpire now in the Chief Justice Renato C. Corona impeachment trial. The court plods along from one item of evidence to the next and presumes that after everything a final judgment may be rendered on the basis of what evidence is finally accepted. But long before the court itself renders its judgement, the collective right brain of the country will have formed a clear and whole picture of what happened. And this picture may not necessarily be based on what pieces of evidence have been accepted by the court. In the end, other evidence will be weighted. And it will not only be the impeached Chief Justice who will be judged. Even the impeachment court itself will be subject to the people’s judgment. And this judgment will not come purely from the left brain. It will be a right brain judgment as well.

As with drawing, the mind fills in the blank spaces once there are sufficient elements on the paper. The final drawing that forms in the person’s mind is always a whole picture. It will always contain more than what is actually there. It is the same way with stories or as it is more popularly called nowadays, narratives. Narratives always result in a larger whole picture with more items of information than are contained in the words themselves. The readers are always free to ask themselves and resolve even the most unexpected questions. And characters and positions may be reversed if only to test the correctness of the text.

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Such questions as for example: What if it was Fasap who in the first instance lost its case against Lucio Tan? Would the Supreme Court have been allowed to reverse itself with the same impunity it has now claimed for itself? Is the judiciary proving to everyone who now looks that there is one sort of justice applied to the rich and powerful than is applied for the powerless?

Of course, CJ Corona’s tack on all this is proving itself true. It has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It was the Chief Justice himself who asserted from the very beginning that the case of impeachment was an assault that would damage the institution of the judiciary more than the person who was impeached. The surveys now prove how correct his claim was, but mostly in the sense of irony. And the worst case possibility has now become the probable scenario. Corona will fall bringing his whole side of the judiciary down with him. Or if not that, then he will have damaged it to such an extent as to bring it down to the same level of regard we once reserved for the executive and legislative branches of government.

It is just as well. For the longest time, we have always suspected a level of corruption in the judiciary corresponding to the same levels attributed to its other co-equal branches. If we did not talk too much about it, it might have been because our own automatic inclination to patriotism prevented us from doing so. And surely, it must have been some twisted form of respect that we once treated judges with the same regard we reserved for priests. By now, we cannot help but say, there are judges and then there are judges. They are all only human. But we knew this already, the same way we knew already that there are priests and then there are priests. But this should not be a call for us now to look the other way.

It is 2012. It is only right that now should be a period of cleansing. And it helps that for once we have a president who is beyond reproach for honesty despite whatever limitations have been attributed to him especially by leftist students. Thus far, there has been no evidence to disprove this. And if there were, his enemies would have found them already. It is only natural that we should apply the same test for honesty to the highest judicial office of the land. We are after all drawing in our minds a whole picture of our future so that we might all sleep better at night knowing the country will get better and not worse. It is for the impeachment court to ensure this. The final picture they draw for us with their final judgment will have to correspond to the picture forming in the collective mind of the country. This mind produces always a full brain picture. If the pictures do not correspond, there will be hell to pay.

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